Environmental Sustainability and the Regulation of New Zealand’s Electricity Market

In this policy paper, NYU Law Environmental LLM alumna Kate Yesberg considers the implications of removing “environmental sustainability” as an objective of New Zealand’s electricity market regulation under the Electricity Industry Act 2010. To do so, the paper looks specifically at the impact of this change on the development of regulatory incentives for investment in distributed electricity generation. At a more general level, it considers the impact of severing the regulatory link between energy and environment. The paper argues that removing environmental sustainability from electricity market regulation has had an adverse impact on New Zealand’s regulatory capacity to deal with climate change, and concludes with a proposal for reform.